


Higher Mathematics

by Cadhla



Category: Real Genius (1985)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 09:04:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1643030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/pseuds/Cadhla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mitch, Jordan, and the future.  Chris Knight slash with.just about everyone, really.  Non-explicit sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Higher Mathematics

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kass

 

 

The first time he makes love to her -- not the first time they have sex, which is a fumbling, messy affair behind the particle accelerator, in that narrow gap that's only supposed to fit one relatively slim lab assistant at a time, and he can barely get his pants down past his thighs, and she can barely breathe from being slammed against the wall, and they both walk away feeling used and slightly dirty, but vindicated somehow, like they've just passed the last remedial class they'd ever have to take -- the first time he makes love to her is in the secret room in the tunnels beneath his dorm room, three days before she graduates. Chris is long gone by then, a distant voice on the telephone and an occasional postcard tacked to the bulletin board, and his new roommate is sixteen, fresh-faced and entirely innocent, just like Mitch used to be, four years and a million lifetimes ago. Mitch tells him to get out for the night. He gets out.

There have been countless books written about the ways a man goes about wining and dining a woman, and Mitch, being the sort of man he's growing up to be, has read, if not all of them, then at least a wider selection than the average man on the street. He knows how to select a fine wine, what words to use to create the subconscious expectation of his desires, how to listen, how to talk, how to respect a woman as a person, and how not to sound like he's only after one thing.

Most importantly of all, he knows that none of this applies to Jordan in the least.

It's true that Mitch doesn't have much experience with women beyond his mother, the ones who throng around his classes, and, yes, Jordan herself, who isn't exactly the world's best index case for learning about girls. Most girls, according to the books he's read, are concerned with clothing, hair, which celebrities are involved with which other celebrities, and possibly, if they need something to do with their Sunday afternoons, with a small and relatively hygienic local cause. Jordan, on the other hand, is concerned with the flash point of most common metals, with the half-lives of radioactive isotopes, and with the breaking strain of complex polymer compounds that didn't exist three days ago, and will be forgotten in favor of something new by the end of the week. Men make fortunes writing books about women. No one's ever written the book on Jordan Cochran.

He assembles the big night with the sort of care he usually applies to experiments with a high probability of explosion (because while he might have fulfilled the prophecy of Chris Knight, who once said that he'd been Mitch before becoming Chris, and become the Chris Knight of a new generation of geniuses and savants, he's never achieved Chris's laissez-faire attitude towards safety protocols): finding the right restaurant, choosing the right flowers, and convincing some of the underclassmen in the engineering department to replicate those flowers in tungsten, which has a higher probability of lasting five minutes in Jordan's presence. Flowers, he's learned, after a few relatively unpleasant and improbable incidents, are both flammable and transitory, and neither of those things is precisely an asset where Jordan is concerned.

He's four years younger than she is. Once, that seemed like an almost insurmountable barrier, the sort of underlying instability which can, over time, completely destabilize an otherwise functional fractal structure. Now, after four years of tangling himself with her, into and around her, it's nothing more than an inconsequential accident of chronology, one rat allowed into the maze a few minutes after the other, both of them more interested in the geometry of their prison than the cheese supposedly waiting at the end. He can no more imagine a world without Jordan than he can imagine a world without oxygen, or one where Chris's jokingly referenced reversal of gravity has come to pass. How will we keep the things in our pockets? Nudity. Of course.

He called Chris a week before, and outlined the plan step by step, from a romantic picnic for two on the roof of the particle physics building -- "Always a hit with the ladies," said Chris, philosophically, "combining starlit skies and the potential for a huge explosion from below," -- to a walk around the campus, to a strategic retreat back to his dorm room, where the aforementioned roommate would have hopefully been taken care of. Even if `taken care of' meant `bound and gagged and stuffed into a dresser drawer'. Not the closet; no, the closet was an integral part of the plan.

"Good luck," said Chris, at the end of the call, and hung up without saying whether he thought the plan would pass or fail, leaving Mitch feeling like a student whose teacher had just refused to tell them how the final exam would be graded. And this is, in a way, a final exam; it's the one that matters.

Jordan has a job offer already. That's a fallacy, because Jordan has a dozen job offers already, and could have a dozen more if she'd consider anything outside California. Jordan has enough job offers for her entire graduating class. But Jordan only has one that she'll take, designing space-age alloys in Seattle, for a company that's probably going to own the world someday. She's already been out to their campus three times; says Mitch will like it there; says the hills are green and restful, although not, she hastens to add, restful enough to make her do anything silly, like go to sleep.

He'd been dating her almost two years before he realized that her lack of sleep was neither disorder nor disease, but phobia writ large: the fear of loss. The fear that, if she stopped thinking long enough for that fabulous mind of hers to lose momentum, inertia would set in, and she'd never be able to get it started back up again. The fear that whatever it was she had that set her apart from the rest of the world, whatever put her on the level she so effortlessly existed on, was just a fluke, and one morning, she'd wake up and find that it had been taken away and put wherever it was that it belonged. The waking could only come after sleep, and so she never slept.

Mitch could tell her a few things about fear, and about the fear that everything around you is just some wonderful dream that's going to end at any moment. Has told Chris a few of those things, on the nights leading up to his graduation -- not the first one to leave, not since Lazlo's glorious departure, but the first one whose leaving was really and for truly real, the first one to make him realize that this wasn't Never-Never Land, that Jordan wasn't Wendy and he wasn't one of the Lost Boys, because if any of them was Peter Pan, it was Chris Knight, and when Chris flew, he flew so very, very far away -- those weird summer nights when the air was hot and hazy and full of possibilities, and the real world seemed so far away.

Jordan didn't take his virginity any more than he took hers; they'd both given that particular hindrance away before that frantic day behind the particle accelerator, and while they've never discussed it, they both know, privately, in that hyperspace that exists only inside relationships, that they gave it to the same man; Chris Knight, with his wicked smile and his clever, clever hands. Mitch wondered if he was gay after those strange and hazy summer nights, but dismissed the idea as illogical, because his dreams are still of Jordan. Chris has never fit inside the rules -- why should a rule as arbitrary as XX versus XY apply to him? Chris is just Chris. Loving him a little is natural, like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. You just did it by breathing.

Chris listened to the things he was afraid of, on those last few nights before he flew out of Never-Never Land forever, and when Mitch was done, he planted a kiss against his forehead -- a kiss he swore he still felt three days later, burning like a brand, when he finally took Jordan by the hands and led her back into the shadows behind the particle accelerator -- and said the most important words he'd ever heard; maybe the most important words he'd ever hear:

"This is not a test. This is not an exam, this is not preparation for something bigger or better or more interesting; this is not a drill. This, my friend, is life. Your life! So don't worry about it! Just live it.

"The universe isn't grading on the curve, Mitch. So you'd better pass."

All that was then, and this is now, and he's still listening; part of him, he thinks, will always be listening. `The Wisdom of Chris Knight', a sold-out lecture series echoing forever in the soul of one occasionally frightened, but learning, young man who used to be a boy, but was never really a child. He takes Jordan to their rooftop picnic with all the solemnity of a knight leading his lady to the battlefield, and the stars are perfect, without a single cloud in the entire sky. The flowers, as he'd hoped, delight her, and she claps her hands and laughs like a little girl.

He takes her down the stairs, still laughing, through the secret door in the back of the closet -- that door, the reason he's never been willing to change rooms, even when seniority and status could have earned him a single all his own -- and her laughter fades to puzzlement as she sees the new writing on the walls. `JORDAN,' it reads, and `I HAVE A QUESTION FOR YOU.'

At the bottom she looks at him, and says a single word: "Mitch?"

He takes her hands and leads her from the car down into the hidden room that was once Lazlo's, and has become their sanctuary. His prepared speech is fumbling and uneasy, but she listens to every word like it was the most fascinating thing she'd ever heard. She's always two steps ahead of him, has always been two steps ahead of him, anticipating the solution to every problem before he gets so much as halfway there, but for once, she doesn't get there before he does, and when he drops to one knee, holding out the other project he's been working on in private, the tiny, almost insignificant-looking ring in the black velvet box, it takes a moment before she can find the words. Jordan, his Jordan, speechless, and more beautiful than she's ever been before.

They make love for the first time there, his ring on her finger, and it doesn't matter that this isn't Never-Never Land, that they aren't Lost Boys or Lost Girls or anything more archetypical than themselves; that someday they'll be as forgotten to the wunderkind of tomorrow as Lazlo has become to the wunderkind of today. They have each other, and they have tonight.

That's all the higher math they need.

 


End file.
